Oh cool! Now I've run into two WKUK members! Although it's less impressive online than randomly meeting someone out of the blue. I wasn't really sure at the time (but had my suspicions obviously). Thanks for the official confirmation!

Actually, I've been wondering something about your group for a while, if you don't mind me asking. Where do you see yourselves mostly standing politically? I've been running the "wiki" tab over on /r/libertarian where I've been making this big resource list for people that have questions and what to learn more, and I've listed a few of your videos in the comedy section that seemed to coincide with a lot of the stuff we're for. Is that intentional, or are we just reading stuff into it? There's been some debate on /r/anarcho_capitalism before over this as well.

I really like your question and the fact that our political affiliation is being debated but I'm exhausted right now and I just finished writing a really long email. So, I'm going to take a break and come back to that in the next couple days. Hope you don't mind, its so I can give you the most thought out and coherent answer possible.

I think I can sum up most of the debate here. The libertarian political position is basically that all "laws" are, by definition, backed up with the threat of force. Making something illegal is not just "asking nicely" for someone to stop doing it. Because of this, we only see laws as legitimate when the threat of force itself is legitimate, which we believe is only okay when it's used in defense of life, liberty, and property (i.e. making murder/assault, slavery, and theft illegal). However, if the law is used for something other then defense, then the law itself is initiating the use of force and has become illegitimate and "unlawful".

Instead, we'd prefer people to work with each other for mutual benefit, voluntarily trading goods and services with each other, instead of resorting to means of compulsion and violence, and every expansion of government away from defense and into every other sphere of life really just turns the government into a big criminal gang that's under the delusion that acts that would be illegitimate for you or me suddenly become okay for itself by the magic of legislation. We believe that acts of violence are just as illegitimate for the state as they are for you and me, and one does not just get a free pass because they call themselves "the government".

Because of all this, we'd see free markets and laissez-faire capitalism as good things where people produce and exchange for mutual benefit, and totalitarianism and socialism as bad things where one may legally gain without the consent and at the expense of someone else.

The clips that I have up on the page are all very good at mocking the pro-war, violent, bureaucratic, propagandizing, power hungry nature of the government, which I'd say are all pretty libertarian ideas. With the anarchy skit, you even made fun of groups that think they abolish things like private property, technology, and exchange and still being able to survive. However, the most explicit discussion of political thought (that I know of at least) was in the Backseat skit where capitalism is just described as "greed" and socialism as "basically just sharing stuff". The joke in the skit was of course the bus driver wanting to stop kids from questioning the status quo in addition to all other backseat troublemaking, so some argued that you guys really are libertarians and getting annoyed at that was just part of missing the joke.

So that's where most of the debate's from, really. Thanks for taking an interest in this question!

Sorry, I got sick for a bit and then just lost track of this. I sat down with Trevor and talked about this for a bit and we came up with a couple of non-answers(sorry). First off, we're a collection of people so there was never one specific world view that was shared. Its five people writing sketches and putting in details that hold true to themselves but these details do not always hold true to all the other group members. Thats where I'm sure a lot of the debate and inconsistancies come from. There are common themes though. I'm pretty sure we all agree that you can't entirely trust your government, and that comes up a lot in our sketches. The second reason that I can't really give you the answer you're looking for is I don't think anyone in the group really believes in political affiliation. I personally think a problem in society today is the everyday man's eagerness to consider themselves a part of a political party in order to know how they should think and feel on a variety of topics rather than make individual decisions on the topics themselves. People call themselves republicans then they turn on fox news (or whatever) and ingest all the opinions thrown at them and then go out into the world regurgitating what they heard as thier own. That way they save themselves the of risk being called dumb(which is something everyone is worried about) in the easiest way possible. Same thing with democrats and cnn. I'm not saying everyone is lazy, looking for the easiest way to do something, but the vast majority of people are and I feel that thinking of yourself in that kind of bubble can lend itself to you accepting someone elses opinions on the world rather than make your own. I hope that gave you a little insight into our thoughts on the issue and I hope I didn't sound dumb.

Thanks for replying! Sorry to hear you got sick. And wow, seems like you have put a good deal of thought into that answer! Thanks for even going so far as to check out other members of the group.

And it doesn't sound dumb at all! If you all agree that governments aren't trustworthy, then it makes sense that some pretty libertarian themes. That's a big thing we emphasize as well. Hope you don't mind us keeping your videos up on the wiki tab then, even if you all don't exactly see yourselves as being one thing or the other.

As for your points on political affiliations, I've got to be in agreement for the most part as well. I consider political parties to be mostly a scam myself. There's a good saying I heard once that kinda sums it all up. "If the government's boot is on your throat, whether it is a left boot or a right is of no consequence."

I think I can come to a defense of some people's laziness though. When people come together as a society, one of the benefits we get from this is the division of labor. People don't need to do everything for themselves, but can instead focus on what they're best at and trade that thing for other goods and services. So one person can mine coal, another can program computers, another bakes bread, others make comedy sketches, etc. But this is true for intellectual matters as well. Not everyone must become a theoretical physicist or a biologist or a chemist or an economist. They can "leave that to the professionals".

In economics, when the cost of educating yourself on something exceeds the benefits you can gain from that thing, we call it "rational ignorance". For the most part, this is a good thing. I don't have any interest in learning biology or any way that I can benefit from it, so why spend time studying that when I can do other things or study something else that's more interesting to me? The same is true for economics and political philosophy. People can't specialize in everything, so they just have to kinda see what ideas are floating around and take people's word on issues.

This does become a big problem in politics though because ultimately what laws are passed, depends upon the ideas commonly held by the people. If people support a law that sounds nice on the surface, but an economist can show is actually based upon a logical fallacy, it doesn't change the fact that the law will still be passed if its popular enough. So unlike the sciences of physics or chemistry, where you can put your ideas to use regardless of public opinion, for an economist to really make use of the knowledge he gets he's got to try and put things in a way to explain to people as best he can why they are acting against their own interest.

And this point on the ideas of the people coming to be law is true no matter what form of government you're under, not just in democracy. Not even the most tyrannical government imaginable can stand simply upon force alone, since rulers are always vastly outnumbered by the people they rule. It must also convince the people that it's actions are "legitimate" so that if the government does something that would be considered a crime if done by you or me, it can get away with it. Hence the need for bread and circus. If you've seen Game of Thrones, they actually had a really cool scene on this idea (minor spoilers).

Murray Rothbard had a really nice quote on this in his essay The Anatomy of the State as well, in which he's talking about how a government preserves itself:

Once a State has been established, the problem of the ruling group or "caste" is how to maintain their rule. While force is their modus operandi, their basic and long-run problem is ideological. For in order to continue in office, any government (not simply a "democratic" government) must have the support of the majority of its subjects. This support, it must be noted, need not be active enthusiasm; it may well be passive resignation as if to an inevitable law of nature. But support in the sense of acceptance of some sort it must be; else the minority of State rulers would eventually be outweighed by the active resistance of the majority of the public. Since predation must be supported out of the surplus of production, it is necessarily true that the class constituting the State – the full-time bureaucracy (and nobility) – must be a rather small minority in the land, although it may, of course, purchase allies among important groups in the population. Therefore, the chief task of the rulers is always to secure the active or resigned acceptance of the majority of the citizens.

Of course, one method of securing support is through the creation of vested economic interests. Therefore, the King alone cannot rule; he must have a sizable group of followers who enjoy the prerequisites of rule, for example, the members of the State apparatus, such as the full-time bureaucracy or the established nobility. But this still secures only a minority of eager supporters, and even the essential purchasing of support by subsidies and other grants of privilege still does not obtain the consent of the majority. For this essential acceptance, the majority must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise and, at least, inevitable, and certainly better than other conceivable alternatives. Promoting this ideology among the people is the vital social task of the "intellectuals." For the masses of men do not create their own ideas, or indeed think through these ideas independently; they follow passively the ideas adopted and disseminated by the body of intellectuals. The intellectuals are, therefore, the "opinion-molders" in society. And since it is precisely a molding of opinion that the State most desperately needs, the basis for age-old alliance between the State and the intellectuals becomes clear.